46. Der Ring des Nibelungen (Richard Wagner)

“The Teutonic reputation for brutality is well-founded. Their operas last three or four days. And they have no word for ‘fluffy’.” – Blackadder

A cursed magic ring; the forging of a broken sword; giants, dwarves, dragons, and Valkyries; and the downfall of the gods in a fiery cataclysm – combined with German philosophy, radical politics, and Greek tragedy.

This is the big one: Wagner’s epic cycle of music dramas, drawing on Icelandic and German sagas – the 10th century Icelandic Poetic Edda, and the 13th century Nibleungenlied. It consists of four operas, composed over thirty years:

Wagner’s admirers make grand claims for the Ring. “It is one of the supreme achievements of the human spirit,” writes Paul Dawson-Bowling (The Wagner Experience: and its meaning to us, 2013). “In its scope and its reach, in its grandeur of conception and abundance of episode, in its universal relevance and its richness of suggestion, and above all in its music, it has no near rival anywhere in art.”

Wagner originally intended only one opera, dealing with the legend of Siegfried, whom he envisaged as a perfect human being. He sketched out Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s Death) in 1848, when he was involved with revolutionary politics. This version was inspired by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (the first anarchist) and Ludwig Feuerbach (German philosopher who influenced Marx), and depicts a new political order, free from religion, capitalism, and tyranny.

A year later, Wagner took part in the failed Dresden Uprising of May 1849, and became a political exile.

He worked on the opera over the next quarter-century. He realized that he needed to tell the events leading up to the tragedy, and wrote three more libretti in reverse order, from last to first. Siegfrieds Tod itself became Götterdämmerung. The poems were complete by 1852.

1876: first complete performance of the Ring Cycle, at Wagner’s own theatre, Bayreuth

Wagner also read the philosopher Schopenhauer, a gloomy bird who believed that existence was pain and suffering, that bringing children into such a miserable existence was morally wrong, and that one must Will one’s own oblivion. In its final form, the Ring is a Schopenhauerian mystical work.

Wagner, in a letter to August Röckel (1854), declared that the opera “shows the necessity of accepting and giving way to the changeability, the diversity, the multiplicity, the eternal newness of reality and life.”

We must learn to die, in fact to die in the most absolute sense of the word. Fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness, and it arises only where love itself has already faded. How did it come about that mankind so lost touch with this bringer of the highest happiness to everything living that in the end everything they did, everything they undertook and established, was done solely out of fear of the end?

My poem shows how. It shows nature in its undistorted truth, with all its opposites intact, which in their manifold and endless permutations also contain elements which are mutually exclusive and self-repelling…

Wotan rises to the tragic height of willing his own downfall. This is everything that we have to learn from the history of mankind: to will the inevitable and to carry it out oneself. The product of this highest, self-destructive will is the fearless, ever-loving man, who is finally created: Siegfried. That is all.

George Bernard Shaw saw it as a critique of industrial society and the evils of capitalism. Others believe it is an ecological parable about man’s relationship with nature. Some critics adopt a psychological approach; Dawson-Bowling, in a Jungian reading, calls it “a compelling allegory of human existence”. Roger Scruton (The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung) says it “tells the story of civilization, beginning at the beginning and ending at the end”. For Thomas Mann, it was “a work of art which turns to the idea of a world brotherhood, free from the illusion of power, or the domination of wealth, whose foundations are justice and love”. Probably not the reasons it appealed to Adolf Hitler, who worshipped Wagner’s operas, and co-opted them as Nazi propaganda.

Wagner developed a new approach to opera for the Ring cycle. He detested conventional opera. It was entertainment, not art; “an institution which … aims almost exclusively at providing diversion and amusement for a population which loves pleasure because it is bored”. Italian opera (Rossini, Donizetti, and their ilk) was a vehicle for displaying singers’ vocal dexterity, while French grand opéra (Meyerbeer) was meretricious and crowd-pleasing. (He also thought Mendelssohn was rubbish because he was a Jew, and dismissed Mozart’s symphonies as noisy dinner-music.)

Opera could, however, be the greatest of all art-forms. Its debased stature was a symptom of the general decline of European civilization. Wagner’s answer was to resurrect Greek tragedy. The Ring Cycle was to be a modern Oresteia, telling the history of human civilization through the sufferings of one family. And, like Greek tragedy, it would speak to the whole community. The original tragedies were not mere entertainment; they were performed at a religious festival, the Dionysia, the yearly Athenian festival in honour of Dionysus. The plays performed there were both religious and political; they were spiritually uplifting, and created empathy through pity and terror, but also debated issues concerning the polis through dramatizations of myths and legends. So important were they to Athenian democracy that the state made it compulsory for all citizens to attend.

Wagner proposed a new sort of opera, the “music drama”.

It would be based on myth, “the ideal subject-matter for the poet”. Myth, he believed, was universal, and true for all time. “The legend, to whatever time or nation it may belong, has this advantage, that it assumes nothing of such a time and such a nation but what is purely human, and renders this in a form, peculiar to itself, of great pregnancy, and therefore at once perfectly intelligible.” In this, he anticipated Jung’s archetypes and collective unconscious.

It would be a Gesamtkunstwerk, a unified artwork. In Greek tragedy, the arts – dance, music, and poetry – had been united; now, they had become untied. Wagner’s music drama would once again unite all the arts. (Conveniently overlooking the fact that contemporary critics had praised Meyerbeer’s operas for bringing together music, theatre, dance, and the visual arts.)

No more arias, duets, ensembles, which got in the way of the drama, and let singers show off.

Instead, infinite melody – in the same way that in Beethoven’s symphonies, “the extension of the melody by the rich development of all its component motives into a large, long-sustained piece of music, which is nothing but a single strictly coherent melody.”

A greater role for the orchestra. In Italian opera, the orchestra was “little more than a monstrous guitar for the accompaniment of arias”. Wagner’s orchestra would act as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action and depicting the characters’ emotions. “The orchestra of the modern symphonist, on the contrary, will be so intimately joined to the motives of the action, that, on the one hand, as embodied harmony it renders the distinct expression of melody possible, whilst, on the other hand, it keeps the melody in the necessary uninterrupted flow, and thus always displays the motives of the dramatic action with most convincing impressiveness to our feelings.”

(See Wagner’s essays Art and Revolution; The Art Work of the Future; Opera and Drama; The Music of the Future.)

Wagner expected his Musikdrama to replace both opera and spoken theatre.

Wagner also developed a series of themes; he called them Leitfaden (“guiding threads”), but they became known as Leitmotifs. The Leitmotif is “an intelligible and emotionally charged musical idea, memorable in itself and replete with musical possibilities” (Scruton, The Ring of Truth). It can represent an abstract idea (Nature), a person (Siegfried), a place (Valhalla), an emotion (Siegfried’s Anger), or an object (the sword Nothung). Over the course of the drama, Wagner modifies the Leitmotifs, or combines them with other motifs to form new ones.

Wagner, as has been often pointed out, and as he himself admitted, did not invent the Leitmotif.Grétry used the recurring theme in his Richard Cœur-de-lion; Méhul, Catel, Meyerbeer, and Halévy regularly used recurring motifs or “master-ideas” in their operas. Few composers, however, used them so systematically – or, one might feel, excessively – as Wagner.

Wagnerites tend to see the Ring as the culmination of Western music (if not civilization), and rewrite musical history around Wagner, in the same way the early Christians made Jesus the focal point of history. Wagner is the Messiah who redeems opera (from the Italians and French) and turns it into music drama. His admirers include – besides Shaw and Mann – James Joyce, Baudelaire, and W.H. Auden.

Others were not convinced. “Wagner is clearly mad,” wrote Berlioz, and abominated his doctrines. Tchaikovsky was bored stiff by the Ring, and thought Wagner’s later operas were untruthful, inartistic, and written on a false theory. Ravel considered Wagner’s influence “pernicious”. Stravinsky thought Wagner undermined and debased musical culture. Nietzsche, once Wagner’s admirer, found Wagner decadent, and preferred Bizet and Offenbach.

Offenbach, for his part, lampooned the music of the future. (Wagner took umbrage; when a fire broke out during a performance of an Offenbach opera, killing many in the audience, he thought it served them right for watching such trash, and joked that all the Jews in Germany should be burnt alive during a performance of Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise.)

Tolstoy claimed the Ring was immoral, while D.H. Lawrence cursed Wagner: “I love Italian opera – it’s so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death… I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don’t care about their ultimate souls, and don’t worry about the ultimate.”

SYNOPSIS

Das Rheingold

CHARACTERS

Gods (Æsir)

Wotan (bass-baritone): August Kindermann

Donner (baritone): Karl Samuel Heinrich

Froh (tenor): Franz Nachbaur

Loge (tenor): Heinrich Vogl

Goddesses

Fricka (mezzo-soprano): Sophie Stehle

Freia (soprano): Henriette Müller

Erda (contralto): Emma Seehofer

Nibelungs

Alberich (baritone): Karl Fischer

Mime (tenor): Max Schlosser

Giants

Fasolt (bass-baritone or bass): Toni Petzer

Fafner (bass): Kaspar Bausewein

Rhinemaidens

Woglinde (soprano): Anna Kaufmann

Wellgunde (soprano or mezzo-soprano): Therese Vogl

Flosshilde (mezzo-soprano): Wilhelmine Ritter

PLACE OF THE ACTION

At the bottom of the Rhine

An open space on mountain heights near the Rhine

The subterranean caves of Nibelheim

The Rhinegold will give ultimate power to whoever possesses it, provided they reject love. Alberich, a dwarf (Nibelung), tries to make love to the Rhinemaidens, the river’s three daughters, who guard the gold. Disgusted by his ugliness, they spurn him. He curses love, and steals the Rhinegold.

The gods are also having problems. The giants Fafner and Fasolt have built Valhalla, a celestial palace, for the gods. Wotan (=Odin), the chief god, has agreed to pay them Freja, goddess of love – but he tries to go back on his bargain. The giants kidnap Freja. Without her magic apples, the gods grow old. (Wagner’s conflated Freya with Iduna.) The giants will give her back in return for the Nibelung’s treasure. Wotan and Loge (=Loki), god of fire, abduct Alberich, and force him to hand over his treasure and the Ring. The dwarf curses the Ring: until it is back in his hands, death will come to its owner. The curse soon comes true; Fafner kills Fasolt for the Ring. The gods enter Valhalla, followed by the reproachful cries of the Rhinemaidens.

Die Walküre

CHARACTERS

Siegmund (tenor): Heinrich Vogl

Hunding (bass): Kaspar Bausewein

Wotan (bass-baritone): August Kindermann

Sieglinde (soprano): Therese Vogl

Brünnhilde (soprano): Sophie Stehle

Fricka (soprano): Anna Kaufmann

Valkyries

Gerhilde (soprano): Karoline Lenoff

Ortlinde (soprano): Henriette Müller

Waltraute (mezzo-soprano): Hemauer

Schwertleite (contralto): Emma Seehofer

Helmwige (soprano): Anna Possart-Deinet

Siegrune (mezzo-soprano): Anna Eichheim

Grimgerde (mezzo-soprano): Wilhelmine Ritter

Rossweise (mezzo-soprano): Juliane Tyroler

ACT ONE

Hunding’s home.

The Valkyrie is Brünnhilde, one of nine daughters the earth goddess Erda bore Wotan; the maidens bring back warriors’ corpses to Vallhalla, and turn them into an army. As part of his scheme, Wotan has also sired two children by a mortal woman: a son, Siegmund, and a daughter, Sieglinde.

Siegmund calls himself “Woeful” for a reason; ill luck dogs him. At the start of the opera, he’s on the run; he has killed a woman’s abductors, and their relatives are gunning for him. The house where he comes looking for sanctuary belongs to Hunding, a member of the enemy clan. Hundnig will put him up for the night – and kill him in the morning. Where, Siegmund asks desperately, is the sword his father promised him?

Siegmund discovers that Hunding’s wife is his twin sister Sieglinde; they seize the magic sword Nothung that Wotan stuck in the tree that grows through the middle of Hunding’s home, become lovers, and run off together.

ACT TWO

Wild, rocky mountains.

Incest and adultery don’t go down well with Wotan’s wife Fricka, goddess of marriage. She persuades Wotan not to protect Siegmund in his fight against Hunding, but to break the sword. Brünnhilde tries to disobey Wotan, believing she is carrying out his will. Wotan makes the sword shatter, so Hunding kills Siegmund. Wotan then kills Hunding. Brünnhilde helps Sieglinde to flee to safety; she will bear a son: Siegfried.

ACT THREE

On top of a rocky mountain (des “Brünnhildensteines”)

Wotan pursues Brünnhilde to a wild mountain. He puts her to sleep in a circle of magic fire; only the greatest hero will be able to cross the barrier and rescue her.

Siegfried

CHARACTERS

Siegfried (tenor): Georg Unger

Mime (tenor): Max Schlosser

Der Wanderer (bass): Franz Betz

Alberich (bass): Karl Hill

Fafner (bass): Franz von Reichenberg

Woodbird (soprano): Marie Haupt

Erda (contralto): Luise Jaide

Brünnhilde (soprano): Amalie Materna

Act I

A cave in the woods

Mime, Siegfried

Mime, Wanderer

Mime, Siegfried

Sieglinde died in childbirth, and entrusted her son to Alberich’s brother Mime. The dwarf has brought Siegfried up in the middle of a forest, and wants to use him to get the Ring, guarded by Fafner (now a dragon). Siegfried forges Nothung, the sword that was broken anew.

Act II

Deep forest

Alberich, Wanderer (Fafner’s Voice)

Siegfried, Mime (Fafner)

Mime & Alberich, Siegfried

He slays Fafner and takes the Ring, then kills Mime, who was plotting to murder him. Able to understand birdsong, thanks to the dragon’s blood, Siegfried learns of Brünnhilde, and sets out to rescue her from her mountaintop.

Act III

Wild area at the foot of a rocky mountain, then: on the summit of “Brünnhildenstein”

Wanderer, Erda

Wanderer, Siegfried

Siegfried, Brünnhilde

Wotan (calling himself the Wanderer) blocks his path, so Siegfried smashes his spear with his sword. (Ooh, Freud!) His power broken, Wotan vanishes. Siegfried discovers Brünnhilde (“That’s not a man!”) and wakes her up with a kiss. The pair become lovers.

Götterdämmerung

CHARACTERS

Siegfried (tenor): Georg Unger

Brünnhilde (soprano): Amalie Materna

Gunther (baritone): Eugen Gura

Gutrune (soprano): Mathilde Weckerlin

Hagen (bass): Gustav Siehr

Alberich (baritone): Karl Hill

Waltraute (mezzo-soprano): Luise Jaide

First Norn (contralto): Johanna Jachmann-Wagner

Second Norn (mezzo-soprano): Josephine Schefsky

Third Norn (soprano): Friederike Grün

Woglinde (soprano): Lilli Lehmann

Wellgunde (soprano): Marie Lehmann

Flosshilde (mezzo-soprano): Minna Lammert

Vassals, women

Prologue

On the Valkyries’ rock

Night falls on the gods. Brünnhilde sends Siegfried into the world to do mighty deeds. The first thing he does is to get himself drugged, forget her, and fall in love with another woman.

Act I

Gunther’s ancestral Hall on the Rhine.

Hagen. Gudrun.

The same.

This is all part of the plan of the loathsome Hagen, Alberich’s son by a mortal woman, and brother to the Gibichungs: Gunther, king of the Rhine, and his sister Gutrune. Gutrune gives Siegfried a magic potion that makes him go crazy for her. He swears an oath of blood-brotherhood with Gunther, and the two down a Bloody Mary Gibichung style, with the emphasis on the blood.

The Valkyries’ rock.

Brünnhilde. Siegfried.

Siegfried, disguised as Gunther, captures Brünnhilde, and brings her back as his wife.

Act II

Before Gunther’s Hall

Hagen.

Siegfried. Gutrune.

The Vassals.

Brünnhilde. Siegfried. Gutrune. Hagen. Vassals, men and women.

Brünnhilde. Hagen.

At the wedding, Brünnhilde accuses Siegfried of lying. She, Gunther, and Hagen agree to kill him.

Act III

Wooded district by the Rhine

The three Rhinemaidens.

Hagen. Gunther. Vassals.

Hagen gives Siegfried another potion, which restores his memory, then skewers him through the middle of the back with a spear.

Gunther’s Hall

Hagen. Gunther. Vassals and women. Brünnhilde.

Brünnhilde orders a funeral pyre to be built for the hero, then throws herself on it. Hagen kills Gunther, then the Rhinemaidens drown him as he tries to get the Ring. And Valhalla goes up in flames.

COMMENTARY

Wagner suffered from chronic constipation. That explains why going through his Ring is slow, painful, and takes 15 hours. Passages of extraordinary power or imagination brighten execrable longueurs – de beaux moments, mais de mauvaises quatre heures, as Rossini so nearly said.

Wagner was, as Tchaikovsky pointed out, a symphonist at heart. That’s why the best parts of the Ring are often orchestral passages, which Wagner handles with genius. (And why the 90-minute Ring ohne Worte is better than the 15 hours of the cycle.) The famous E flat major triad chord that swells into the River Rhine; the Magic Fire Music; the Forest Murmurs, which Wagner turned into the charming (rare word to use of Wagner!) Siegfried’s Idyll; Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, and the Funeral March are all the work of a great composer. Then, too, the preludes to the acts: the storm at the start of Walküre; or the menacing, rumbling prelude to Act II of Siegfried, which describes the dragon coiled over his treasure.

But, as an opera composer, he’s a damn fine symphonist.

The problem is that his approach is wrong-headed. It’s based on a false premise: that conventional opera, with its arias and ensembles, is awful, and that music drama is great. It’s easily disproved. 1) Listen to Rossini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Mozart, or Berlioz. 2) Listen to Wagner.

Dear God, he’s talky! The vocal line is heightened recit, nearly always one note to a syllable – and as dull as the old secco recit at its worst. (Is Wagner’s arioso, and emphasis on mythological spectacle a throwback to Lully?) He calls for singers with loud, powerful voices who can make themselves heard over a gigantic orchestra, rarely for agility or beauty. (The Rhinemaidens and the Woodbird are the notable exception.)

Wagner’s reliance on Leitmotifs seems excessive. Rather than writing new tunes, or developing a melody, he can combine old ones, like sticking together Lego bricks. It’s a triumph of technical skill – but it’s boring. Any Italian hack (a Cagnoni or a Pedrotti, say) could write a two-hour opera with lots of tunes, rather than using the same fragments of melody over again. But, of course, Wagner wrote books convincing the public that his approach was the best way.

Nor, for a music drama, is there much of either.

Das Rheingold – the last libretto to be written, but the first opera to be composed – is The Silmarillion to Wagner’s Lord of the Rings: a tedious slab of mythology.

It starts and finishes superbly, let it be said. The Rhine music and the procession of the gods into Walhall (modelled on Rossini’s Guillaume Tell) are both impressive.

Otherwise, it’s staggeringly boring. Not an aria, not a duet, not a chorus: a wasteland. There’s almost no singing, except for the Rhinemaidens. All the musical interest (such as it is) lies in the orchestra. There’s the odd interesting Leitmotif: the majestic Valhalla theme, the heavy footfall of the giants, or the clinking of the anvils in Niebelheim (inspired, like the opening of Meistersinger, by Halévy’s Juive). I can also hear Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (the procession of the nuns) when Alberich summons the Nibelungs. For the rest, nothing.

The story moves as slowly as a Scandinavian glacier. Scene II is one of the dullest things in all opera: an hour of marital bickering and discussions about real estate. Eduard Hanslick called it

an abyss of boredom… This utterly tuneless, plodding narrative, in a slow tempo, engulfs us like an inconsolable broad sea from which only the meagre crumbs of a few leitmotifs come floating to us out of the orchestra. Scenes like this recall the mediaeval torture of waking a sleeping prisoner by stabbing him with a needle at every nod.

Wagner’s gods, giants, and dwarves bear little resemblance to living beings, whether real or fantastical. The Wagnerophiles, of course, think they’re the bees knees. “It is only in Shakespeare and Wagner’s own Die Meistersinger,” writes Dawson-Bowling, “that we encounter a gallery of characters modelled so rapidly, so distinctively and with such understanding.” Off the top of my head: Mozart’s Marriage ofFigaro and Don Giovanni, Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, Meyerbeer’s Huguenots, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and Verdi’s Don Carlos.

Félix Clément hit the nail on the head, with his customary French objectivity: “The music of the first scene is charming almost from start to finish ; the fourth scene has pages full of grandeur and of a superb breath. But, like in all Wagner’s operas, the whole is remarkable for its terrible longueurs, its unnecessary repetition, its lack of measure and proportion. Which doesn’t prevent, by the way, the beautiful pages from shining with an incomparable brilliance.”

Die Walküre introduces human beings. The first act is warmly lyrical; here we find Sieglinde’s description of the mysterious old man (Wotan) at the feast; Siegmund’s desperate appeal to his father as he searches for the promised sword; and the passionate, springtime love of the twin Volsungs.

The rest, though, is dull beyond belief: a bloated, tuneless, pompous, portentous, sententious nullity. More interminable stuff with the gods. All recit, plus a recap of Rheingold. Is it actually music?

Wagner was also notorious for monopolizing conversations. One can tell. Characters declaim for minutes without interruption, and they all sound like Wagner. It’s not just that Wagner needed editing; Wagner, it’s apparent, had little sense of pacing, or of what worked onstage.

And yet there are moments of musical genius. The Ride of Valkyries is famous, of course, but Sieglinde has a lovely melody in Act III, which lasts less than a minute; then Wagner goes back to declamation. It returns at the very end of the cycle, as a radiant symbol of love. Wotan’s Farewell is tender and tragic, and the flickering, dancing Magic Fire Music is as brilliantly orchestrated as Rimsky-Korsakov.

Arrigo Boito attended the first performance of the opera at La Scala, Milan. In a letter to Verdi (31 December 1893), he wrote:

The Milanese press has hurled abuse at Mascheroni, as though on a rabid dog, calling him responsible for the infinite tedium the opera caused. That is unfair. The prime cause for the opera’s unpopularity must be sought in the opera itself and Wagner’s system of composition. Another cause is the vastness of the stage, which makes the drama seem wretchedly small. Then there is the insipid action which moves more slowly than a passenger train stopping at every station, and the interminable sequence of duets during which the stage stays miserably empty and the characters stupidly motionless. All this is not calculated to please.

This was the year Falstaff, Verdi’s last opera, premièred. Boito’s libretti for Falstaff and Otello are dramatically fleet, concise, and reveal character through action – everything the Ring isn’t, and doesn’t. Verdi would have got through the whole thing faster, with a tune – and would never have written an hour-long scene for two characters entirely in recit.

Siegfried is Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, told in four and a half hours. It’s also the ancestor of those fantasy novels where a young orphan boy turns out be the heir. He even has a BIG SWORD (which, Wagner helpfully tells us, is stiff and hard).

The opera must have one of the oddest, most unlikeable dramatis personae of any opera. There’s the loutish Teutonic wunderkind Siegfried, who wants to beat up Mime for being ugly even before he’s learnt Mime wants to kill him. Wagner called him “a perfect human being” – which says much about Wagner. Then there are Mime, who sings in an unmusical whine; the megalomaniac Alberich, with his dreams of world domination; and the devious, enigmatic Wotan – plus a bird, a dragon, an Earth goddess, and a warrior maid asleep on a rock.

Did Wagner have any grasp on storytelling? Act I is dramatically feeble, and the whole Mime/Wanderer scene should have been cut; it recaps Rheingold and Walküre. It’s also dramatically preposterous; hello, my host, want to wager for my head? At least the Forging Song is exciting.

I was obviously suffering from Stockholm syndrome [*]; I enjoyed Act II. (Well, except for yet more tedious bickering, this time between Alberich and Mime.) The Forest Murmurs are lovely. And – oh, look! – there’s even a joke, as Siegfried tries to imitate the bird on his reed pipe, and invents jazz. (It’s about the only bit of comic relief in the whole 15 hours.) And Siegfried fights a DRAGON! (An exciting bit in the Ring, nearly 10 hours in.)

[*] Not to be confused with Stockhausen syndrome, which is when midway through a 29-hour opera cycle, usually on a Wednesday, you find yourself worshipping a composer who comes from another planet, like Jesus. Stockhausen is the sort of guy who makes Wagner look eminently sane.

Brünnhilde’s Awakening in Act III is a radiant piece of music. Then comes a long, long scene which ends with what Wagner intended to be a love duet. The pair sing abstract phrases at each other: “Laughing, let us perish! … Dusk of the gods, let your darkness descend! Night of annihilation, let your mist fall! … Radiant love, laughing death!” The Huguenots or Troyens it’s not; it lacks either tenderness or passion. Still, the opera’s not excruciating, so it’s better than Rheingold or Walküre.

Götterdämmerung is easily the best part of the Ring. Wagner is telling a story about people, and it has some dramatic conflict (rather than petty squabbling, telling the audience what they already saw in last night’s opera, or spewing Schopenhauer over the stage).

True, there are the usual appalling longueurs. The whole Prologue and first Act lasts 2 hours. Wagner needed an editor. It opens with 20 minutes of Norns singing exposition, and the scene for the two Valkyries drags. On the other hand, it does have Siegfried’s Rhine Journey.

Act II, though, is one of the four theatrically engaging acts of the Ring, because it has a dramatic situation. It also has Hagen’s H O I H O ! ! !; the chorus (the first in the Ring); and the electrifying vengeance trio.

And we’re at Act III, the last part of the Ring. (Thank God!) The Rhinemaidens’ trio is lovely, and the scene with Siegfried charming and relaxed. The Funeral March is extraordinary, at once angry, despairing, and triumphant.

The opera ends with Brünnhilde’s famous long scena before she throws herself onto the funeral pyre, à la Norma, and then all goes cataclysmic: floods, fires, and collapsing buildings. We can see the influence of French grand opera: Auber’s Muette de Portici, where Vesuvius erupts as the heroine leaps to her death, and Meyerbeer’s Prophète, where mother and son die in a fiery, purifying apotheosis, their sins redeemed, as the banqueting hall explodes.

So that’s The Ring.

Is it one of the great achievements of mankind? Hardly!

Still, it’s easy to see why Wagner held, and still holds, such an extraordinarily high position. He appealed to bourgeois intellectual snobbery. Wagner flattered his audience. Nobody would willingly sit through all of Wagner if he hadn’t convinced them that his music was deep and meaningful, whereas what they would naturally enjoy (i.e., stuff with tunes in) is “entertainment”. To like Wagner is a sign of culture; to dislike him – or, worse, to prefer opera – is a sign of bad taste. Wagner wrote theories, therefore he’s good; Rossini and Meyerbeer didn’t, therefore they’re not. Of course, as someone (Chesterton?) said, people don’t listen to music because of some theory they have about music; they listen to music because they like it. This offends the snob, who can only like something if it has social cachet. Besides, Rossini and Meyerbeer wrote music that pleases, that (horror!) ordinary people enjoy, so they must be vulgar. Wagner, on the other hand, is spiritually uplifting and morally edifying. It’s the musical equivalent of castor oil. It may taste horrible, but it does you good. It’s the same reason why the literati hailed James Joyce as a great novelist.

There’s nothing wrong, in principle, with the idea of a music drama. Opera, after all, is theatre through music. Verdi himself, Italo Pizzi wrote, “like all discerning people, approved the Wagnerian principle of adapting the music to the drama, but he did not approve the method, because Wagner, and his imitators to an even greater extent, often deliberately overstepped the limits”. Verdi himself, though, had been writing music dramas since the mid-1840s; certainly from Macbeth, Stiffelio, and Luisa Miller, if not as far back as I due Foscari.

Puccini, Massenet, and Richard Strauss – all superior opera-writers – adapted the Wagnerian system to some degree, but without eliminating arias and ensembles; rather, the pieces arise naturally from the action. Whereas Wagner wrote his music with his theory first, they wrote music from the text; Massenet, in particular, like Stephen Sondheim, let content dictate form. They also had the benefit of 1) professional librettists, 2) a sympathy with ordinary mortals, and understanding of human nature, 3) a sense of theatre, 4) a sense of humor, and 5) a sense of proportion.

8 thoughts on “46. Der Ring des Nibelungen (Richard Wagner)”

I agree strongly with this review and I am so grateful that we have finally escaped the dark age when anything not German, including Verdi in some extreme circles outside of Italy of course, was considered trash. Nick you truly hit the nail on the head with this one and I can not wait for you to review another, preferably much earlier, Wagner opera. I believe that most people misinterpret Wagner’s unprecedented ego with actual talent, his works gradually became specifically calculated to “wow” Teutonic intellectuals, much in the same vein that he accused Meyerbeer of doing regarding the Parisian elite. I wonder if The Ring would be more interesting were a conductor to finally take an axe to the thing and cut it down to, say, four hours? There are certainly easily identifiable chunks of low musical and narrative quality, although the greatest flaw in the Cycle is the fact that the story is frankly not all that interesting.

This post, though, has made Wagnerians throw their keyboards at me in a rage.

Early Wagner I like more. The Flying Dutchman moves quickly, and has that great overture, the spinning chorus, and the sailors’ chorus. Tannhauser has, at least ,some excellent music, even if it’s long and static (and, whisper it low, leans heavily on Robert le Diable!).

Lohengrin is probably my favourite Wagner – but it has its longueurs. I really like the first act, with its big choruses, and the Grail Narrative in Act III.

Have you heard Das Liebesverbot? It’s fun and fast-paced: two adjectives utterly otherwise alien to him! The overture is Herold’s Zampa on speed. And David Le Marrec (Carnets sur Sol) really likes Die Feen. Rienzi, though, is ghastly – and people call it Meyerbeer’s best opera! It doesn’t sound anything like him.

There are, as I said, extraordinary musical pieces in the Ring, but Wagner’s influence on opera has been catastrophic; like a black hole, he warped space and time around him. The critics and snobs started comparing French opera and Italian opera to the Wagnerian prescription – a standard by which they were never meant to be judged – and they were found wanting, and dropped from favour.

A lot of his “innovations”, too, didn’t originate with him. Apart from leitmotifs, through-composed operas sung largely in recitative were a staple of the French tradition, if not as far back as Monteverdi!

Possibly his greatest positive influence was on Richard Strauss – but Strauss increasingly turned his back on Wagner, and went back to Mozart and the 18th century.

I am so sorry that I have stoked a Wagnerite war on your blog, I did not mean to do so! I have actually heard all of Wagner’s operas from Die Feen to Parsifal and I own Sir Denis Forman’s “Good Wagner Opera Guide” because I take my blog review methodology from his two operatic tomes. You and I have basically the same opinion on early Wagner, I like Dutchman quite a lot (I have three recordings of it) and Lohengrin is musically to me the best of Wagner’s operas (although the plot is so inane). I frequently find myself saying that I wished Wagner had died during the 1849 Dresden Uprising so his single accepted masterpiece today would be Lohengrin.

Das Liebesverbot I must admit did not leave that much of an impression on me, although I have heard it through twice, but I do get the reference to Harold’s Zampa, very accurate! The opening chorus does sound like something one would expect from the Ziegfeld Follies a eighty years later though. I strangely like Rienzi if I am listening to a recording, watching it one sees that it is a proto-fascist pain. It is gravely overblown and seems to include every possible melody one could think of (or not think of), almost as if Wagner (the massive ego) was trying to write the entire romantic era of music into this poor thing. At four and a half hours, seriously, why man? Die Feen is okay musically (the plot is unredeemable madness), but one can really tell where all the bumps and jolts are in the score and he overuses/abuses the one really grand almost supernatural melody which he presents at the top of the overture.

Definitely the best point you make is that the comparison of Wagner with French or Italian works is frankly wrongheaded, they are not the same at all. La Gioconda and Lakme are not the same sort of music as Meistersinger or Tristan and they shouldn’t be seen as such nor ridiculed for being different. Wagner’s popularity possibly has more to do with the fact that he was (even more than Verdi was to Italian opera) almost the entirety of 19th century German opera. Given the fact that particularly Anglophone countries have tended historical to worship everything German and hate anything frankly not German (re: “symphonic”), the continued march of the Wagnerite lemmings is not too shocking. I decided years ago that I was a non-Wagnerian, and I listened to all of his operas first so I had street credit because his followers can be as rabid as members of a religious doomsday cult. I don’t understand how anyone could choose to concentrate all of their attention on a single composer and be so disinterested in the context in which they existed. Verdi led me to Meyerbeer who led me to Gounod and Massenet. To Wagnerites, Wagner leads to no one else, it is so incestuous and ultimately barren. Anyone with a background in French opera as you do knows that Wagner borrowed heavily from everyone from Lully to Meyerbeer (I do get the irony that neither of them was actually French).

What would Verdi have done with the Ring? He would not have written it if he had thought of it to be honest. The story isn’t exactly the “human drama” one would expect from him what with its disinteresting cast of characters and sprawling scope. Frankly the supernatural, or unnatural, was never really to Verdi’s taste. Valkyries and fairies worked for Wagner because he wanted to essentially write parables set to symphonic music, but Verdi was (like Meyerbeer) a true man of the theatre. Not that Wagner did not have some sense of acting although if he had written straight plays no one would know who he is today. It took a century of German orchestral innovation to give us Wagner, and apparently the infection remains to this day. 🙂

No need to worry, Phil! I posted a link to the review on a classical music forum a while back.

I wouldn’t go as far as wishing Wagner died early – but if only he’d decided his métier was orchestral music! Then we would have been spared Tristan and the Ring, pseudery, and fanaticism.

I mean, of course, a true and proper appreciation of Wagner, at his own estimation.

Incestuous? Not at all! You’ve got Wagner; why do you need anyone else?

It was, ironically, Wagner who led me to Meyerbeer, and the other rarities. I was briefly, intensely infatuated with Wagner in my early twenties, six months where – while also discovering Verdi – I listened to all Wagner’s mature operas, watched DVDs, and read criticism. And then I came out the other side.

I suspect my early grounding in Mozart, Rossini, and G&S, and a native bump of common sense, saved me. And I was uneasy with Wagner’s rabid anti-Semitism.

The books mentioned a bloke called Meyerbeer, who was terribly popular in his day; a sort of imitator of Rossini who might have influenced Wagner, but really wasn’t terribly good. And yet… His operas sounded FUN: big ensembles, mixed with bel canto and special effects.

I watched the Opera Australia DVD of Les Huguenots, really knowing nothing other than it involved the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. It’s Joan Sutherland’s last performance, and the tenor is inadequate – but I was hooked. It wasn’t just entertaining; it was one of the best operas I’d seen, full stop. Great music, often close to Mozart; an exciting story; vivid characters; and a powerful message about the evils of fanaticism and intolerance. The production ends with St. Bris starting to cross himself when he finds his daughter dead – and then stopping. He’s realised where his blind faith has led him.

As a trained historian I sometimes seek the “what if” moment and the Dresden rebellion was that turning point for Wagner. However your preference for Wagner as symphony composer, not opera, post-1849 is less dire and more probable. A 50-minute Tristan and/or Seigfried Symphony might have been a merciful alternative, but I wonder if Parsifal would have been rendered even less intelligible by the change in format? After all, even Wagner claimed he wrote operas because his stories would be more intelligible with sung libretti than without, although if you are going to put people through a four hour game of “ultimate recitative”…. I’m so glad Humperdinck had the good sense of making Hansel und Gretel a 2 hour numbers opera, otherwise I don’t think it would be so child-friendly.

My first experience of Meyerbeer was the 1962 Milan performance with Sutherland, Corelli, Simionato and Ghiaurov and even with the low quality sound I knew I had found the “missing link” between Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Verdi. What I love most about Meyerbeer was his brilliant internationalism, stagecraft, and the religio-historical nature of his subject matter. By brilliant internationalism I mean his combination of German orchestral techniques and his own novel dissonant instrumental combinations with his Italian bel canto training to create something entirely new. His works are neither German, Italian, nor even French but cosmopolitan just as his orchestra is rich but never at the expense of beautiful singing which to me is what opera is ultimately about. Being of Huguenot ancestry, to know that someone had written a grand opera about the events of 1572 rather excited me. I then did more research about Meyerbeer and discovered the Meyerbeer Club. I sorely miss their article on Le Prophete and the alternative ideas Scribe developed like Berthe joining a beauty contest and being selected ironically by the Anabaptist Trinity as Jean’s bride.